Conversations with Dean Brown
Quentin Young discusses homophobic slurs in the NHL with Ottawa Senators play-by-play man Dean Brown.
Dean Brown has worked for TSN 1200 since the beginning. He is
the play-by-play broadcaster for the Ottawa Senators. A veteran of almost 25 years in the business, Dean is the model of excellence within the field.
(All quotes are verbatim, in order to protect the intended meaning.)
Quentin: Players need to be held to a higher standard, you understand that. Do you think that the (NHL) needs to be getting into the semantics of verbal offences or is there some simpler form like a generic “disrespect” penalty that can be used, like an unsportsmanlike conduct on the ice?
Put it this way, everything is changing, and everything is changing because of the media. Before, there weren’t as many cameras and as many microphones at ice level, you know really the language between players was moderated pretty much by themselves. If you said something that was inappropriate, it was deemed to be inappropriate by the other players, not by the league, not by the officials. If you said something inappropriate, someone would come over and challenge you, or punch you in the mouth. That’s how language on the ice was moderated. Things have changed now, though, and the media’s changed. We have cameras, we can see the player’s lips moving.
In the case of Ryan Getzlaf, I don’t know who he was talking to, if it was towards the referee that he used that word. I think the reason a lot of people saw that one differently is that there were (misleading) reports that came out in the media, and I was one of the ones who was misled. This was reported by some people to be a homophobic slur, until you found out what he actually said, and realized this has nothing to do with homophobia. It’s just an inappropriate word, calling someone that, the c-word, but that’s not a homophobic slur. That’s why when I tweeted at the very beginning, you know, ‘this is completely inappropriate,’ until I found out it was not a homophobic slur, it was just a poor decision of language. Still not acceptable, but that’s a different realm, you know, this is a different thing than a homophobic slur. Homophobic slurs, and racial slurs, they’re kind of in a different, separate category to me, and I think most people. Appropriate language is all about having, basically, the ability to present your product to a family, either on tv or radio. I think there’s been, generally, in our society, an acceptance of the ‘F word’ in situations where now nobody gets upset about that a great deal, because it’s become so commonplace, but there are other words, a couple beginning with ‘C’ are still not acceptable, so I don’t know if you can have a policy where you can say ‘this is what you can and can’t say on the ice’, I think you sit with the players and explain to them that it’s not in their best interests, but all you can do is deal with things like after game suspensions and fines on a case-by-case basis, simply because the other problem is our lexicon as a society is changing all the time. There are words today that exist in our language that didn’t exist five years ago, so how do you work out on paper a list of words that you can’t say when there will be new words tomorrow? So I don’t know if they can do anything differently from what they do now, but it may happen more often now that there’s more cameras and microphones.
We look to baseball, and very recently we’ve seen (before the Getzlaf comment) Kevin Pillar in trouble. He used THE homophobic slur, he came out and made his apologies and was suspended two games by the team, rather than the league, and his salary was donated to the cause. Is that something we should see more in hockey, where the players are allowed a little bit more leeway from the league so that they might make amends themselves? Andrew Shaw, for example joined the You Can Play initiative following a past transgression in the NHL which lead to a one-game suspension and a fine.
Sure. I think that those are always great areas of outreach. The only thing about it is it’s one of those things you wish, not real life, but I wish that the guys who are involved with that program, the guys who never said anything homophobic would get as much media attention as the guy who’s doing it because he said something homophobic and feels like he has to make amends, so one one hand I agree completely. Andrew Shaw used a homophobic slur directed at a player on the ice and was penalized for it, as he should’ve been by the league. He took steps to try and make amends to the community that he insulted, and to the league, which he did not represent well. I don’t know that the team did anything, but like you I like that the team went out saying ‘this is unacceptable in our organization’ but you can’t force teams to do that. It’s one of those things though. If you asked someone to name every team’s representative in the You Can Play project in the league, I’d wonder if anyone could name more than one or two of the representatives that have done more for the cause, but aren’t Andrew Shaw. We just seem as the media to focus on the guy that got caught doing something. They get a great deal of exposure for their misdeeds and then try to make amends. We almost completely ignore the guys who have done the very right thing right from the beginning, and have never said anything derogatory or done anything but support that community. I think it’s a sad part of the way our business works, and the things that we focus on, but as to the original question, I think both those things are great things, I’m just not sure you can institute them as rules because it’s an ever-changing environment. A rule that you make up today that revolves around language and inappropriate language can completely change by tomorrow.
The other problem is that you can’t get away from the fact that there are things that if you’d said them today would be considered inappropriate but there are teams in many leagues that have logos and identities which would be considered completely inappropriate if you were to present those things today, but we haven’t changed those things, because of the heritage of those logos, and the heritage of those names within sports, but if you went to register the Washington Redskins as a name today, what league would allow your team to call themselves the Redskins? It’s ridiculous, but that’s part of the ever-changing tone of what is appropriate or inappropriate, if you made a list of what was inappropriate, you could be updating said list every six months.
You touched on the cameras being on the players. We can see their lips move now, we’re getting a lot closer to the game than ever before. Do you think that maybe we’re getting too close? I mean, we talked about the anonymity of the You Can Play reps. Should we be focussing more on that, rather than continue to break through the barrier into the game from the set of the tv?
That’s an interesting question, because I personally don’t think of it in those terms, what you should do, just being in the business my entire professional life. I just know how the business works so I’ve never thought about whether it should be done. I just know it has been done and will be done more, because fans want to get as inside the game as they can possibly get. The problem is, that there’s always a certain constituency amongst fanbases, where they don’t want to hear some of the language and they don’t want to see the spitting and the figure pointing, the things that are a part of every game, not just in hockey but in many sports. People always say if you really love hot dogs, don’t ever go to the factory and see how they’re made. Well, it’s the same way with this, the fans want to get right inside the game, they wanna be close, have mics on the bench, hear the players yelling at each other, and then complain about foul language and mean-spirited talk. Well, that’s what happens.
It’s like going into an operating system and thinking you’re not gonna see blood. It’s part of fixing things, it’s how it goes. I don’t really think the cameras are backing up though, we’re just going to keep getting closer to the game.
Quentin Young is a hockey writer for theocho.ca. He gets mad when his articles underperform, so please share this piece. Follow Quentin on Twitter at @young_quentin.
